For a time, we do not hear of popular agitation and riots in the streets. This may be explained by the gaps in our inadequate surviving sources, but it does appear that the role of the people in political life declined from this point on. They still elected officeholders, but candidates were nominated or preapproved by the princeps, presumably after informal consultations with the interested parties.
All of this suggests an arrangement out of which everyone got something. His added consular authority completed Augustus’ hold on power and convinced a suspicious Roman public that he was genuinely in charge of the state. By contrast the nobiles welcomed their return to the consulship, and were grateful to Augustus for his efforts to restore their ancient dignitas.
Augustus was a reformer who liked to move forward at a snail’s pace. In many aspects of his administration, change and innovation proceeded step by step over many years.
Time and again, he did his best to improve the functioning of the Senate, which, together with the people, remained the legal source of authority in the state. Rather than appoint more censors, the princeps decided in 18 B.C. to use his new consular authority to act as a censor himself (as he and Agrippa had done in 28 B.C.) and review the membership of the Senate. He raised the minimum wealth of a senator from 400,000 to 1 million sesterces, a substantial sum of money. This set a significant distance between the senatorial and the equestrian orders, and helped to create a distinct senatorial class. Birth as well as property became a qualification. In the days of the Republic only senators could lay claim to senatorial status, but from now on sons of senators acquired the status as of right, while others were obliged to apply for it.
As the princeps had discovered ten years previously, cleansing the Senate of its reprobates was a tricky and unpopular exercise. His dream was to reduce it to three hundred members, which would make it a much more effective legislative body. He devised an ingenious scheme, which was intended to achieve his objective with the least possible blame attaching to him.
He selected thirty senators, each of whom was then to choose a further five. Each group of five would choose one of its number by lot, who would become a senator. This man would repeat the process, which was to continue until three hundred senators had been found. The scheme being too clever by half, various malpractices developed, the proceedings ground to a confused halt, and Augustus was obliged to take over the selection himself. He ended up by creating a Senate of six hundred members and seriously annoying a large number of people. In compensation, he gave various privileges to those who had been expelled. They were allowed to stand for election to the various offices of state; in due course most of them returned to the Senate.
The exercise had been an almost complete waste of time and energy. For all his auctoritas, his dignitas, and his imperium, the princeps knew that he touched the Senate, the heartland of the republican idea, at his peril. He also knew when to admit defeat. There was always time, and he could return to the subject in the future.
So the Senate remained a somewhat unsatisfactory institution. Augustus always treated it with great respect and took trouble to consult it. He encouraged freedom of expression and his speeches were often interrupted by remarks such as “I don’t understand that!” or “I’d dispute that if I had the chance!” However, its members did not take their responsibilities as seriously as he would have wished. In 17 B.C., fines for nonattendance were increased and quorums were set for certain classes of business.
Sometime between 27 and 18 B.C., the princeps took a step aimed at expediting decision-making, which recognized the difficulty that any deliberative body has in agreeing on clear-cut actions. He set up a senatorial standing committee, which consisted of himself, one or both consuls, one each from the quaestors, aediles, and praetors, and fifteen other senators chosen by lot. Some members changed every six months and the whole committee once a year, except for the princeps. Its task was to prepare business for full sessions of the Senate.
A group of twenty-one is still rather too large to be efficiently executive, and the rapid turnover must have prevented it from building a collective esprit de corps or devising long-term policies. This was probably as the princeps intended, for he reserved strategic planning to himself and a small, informal group of advisers, the amici Caesaris, “Caesar’s friends.” The standing committee’s job must mainly have been to receive and discuss already prepared positions, and to act as a sounding board of senatorial opinion. It probably worked by consensus and guided discussion in the full Senate.
The Senate’s powers remained advisory in principle, and bills were still laid before popular assemblies for approval. However, its decrees or senatusconsulta were increasingly regarded as binding, especially when specifically supported or initiated by the princeps.
Both the Senate and the princeps acquired new legal powers. The old republican courts of law, the iudicia publica, remained in being, presided over by praetors. But cases of treason or otherwise high political importance could be brought to one of two new courts, the princeps in council or the consuls in the Senate, against which there was no appeal. The ever growing number of citizens made it impractical to remit all criminal prosecutions to Rome, so proconsuls were given the authority to carry out judicial functions.
Under the Republic, any citizen found guilty of an offense had the right to appeal to the people. However, Augustus was given the authority to overturn a sentence of death by the use of his imperium. So provocatio ad populum gave way to appellatio ad Caesarem, an appeal to Caesar.
Augustus sought to improve the honesty and efficiency of imperial administration. Without interfering excessively in local ways of doing things, he and Agrippa introduced orderly governance throughout the empire and, in the Gallic and Spanish provinces and Africa where they were missing, the benefits of urban living. Regular censuses were held to enable a fair assessment of the provincial tax burden, and tax collection was made fairer.
In Rome itself, the princeps borrowed Egnatius Rufus’ idea of maintaining a troop of six hundred slave firefighters (in A.D. 6, this was expanded into seven cohorts of firemen, each cohort being responsible for two of the fourteen districts into which Augustus divided the city). Three cohortes urbanae, or urban cohorts, were established to police the city.
Augustus did not interfere in the local government of Italy. He left its four hundred or so towns and cities to manage their own affairs as they had always done, except in two respects. He divided the peninsula into eleven departments for the purpose of the census of citizens and of the registration of public land. And, more important, he recognized the need for speedy communications. He tried to persuade senators to invest some of the spoils of successful military campaigns in improving and extending the Italian road network. When that failed, he himself took over the cura viarum, the responsibility for roads, and made large donations from his own pocket for road construction.